I’m not totally with Phil on this point – it’s hard to imagine a conversational UI accomplishing whatever fix most folks seem to get scrolling through their Facebook Newsfeed, quickly liking this post or commenting on that one, spraying sentiment everywhere.

But it’s a potent ask: Could a savvvy enterprise vendor edge rivals by earning trust as the conversational workflow wrapped around cloud apps? And would that trust, as Phil warns, become a next gen lock-in? Phil:

This doesn’t mean the battle with walled gardens is over. It just means it has moved to a new frontier.

Diginomica picks – my top three stories on diginomica this week, by three of our terrific female writers:

‘What can we do better?’ – Deutsche Bahn’s talent question – Janine with a use case from a company trying to do talent the right way. Almost fell off my tuchus when I read this: “We are also very authentic and tell people that from time to time there are things not great in our company and need improving.”

Career 2.0 – managing the Returners – Cath on an vital – and neglected – workplace demographic: parents who want to return to work. If your company cares about talent, they should care about “returnships.”

Not just bubble wrap – Sealed Air aims to sell knowledge with SAP Hybris – Derek with a nifty use case from SAP Hybris Live Barcelona: “You’re going to get cultural resistance regardless of any sort of technology you go to, because there is going to be legacy processes that are going to be hard to tackle. There’s a lot of legacy knowledge in there, where you need to be very mindful of.”

The 2022 Salesforce Economy – 3.3 million new jobs, $859 billion new revenues – As Dreamforce beckons, Stuart parses some eye-popping numbers: “The report find that the Salesforce ecosystem in 2017 is nearly four times bigger than Salesforce itself, while by 2022 it will be more than five times bigger. IDC estimates that in 2017 for every dollar Salesforce will make, partners in the the ecosystem will make $3.67 and will reach $5.18 by 2022.” Yes, I’ll take a grain of salt – but there’s no denying the potency of this ecosystem.

Turns out click-and-collect isn’t just the holy grail, for 02, it’s mission-freaking-impossible. “There’s a problem with your order” is never a happy start. We go downhill from there. And we get another Lauchlan original: “Patronising as a service.”

Best of the rest

Lead story – Google and Facebook throw their algorithmic weight around – by several smart peeps

myPOV: It was an up and down week for the ambassadors of whatever-the-f@ck-they-want-to-know-about-us, Google and Facebook. The New Stack had the sunnier side, with an intruiging look at project workflow in No Grumpy Humans and Other Site Reliability Engineering Lessons from Google – (Thinking “No grumpy humans” doesn’t apply to all the grumpy Chromebook humans Google thwacked when they kiboshed their YouTube video editor with an unceremonious iron fist of disappearing functionality, but that’s another story).

Steve Wilson is thinking along similar lines in The myth of the informed Internet user, but he thinks when users realize the extent of what Facebook knows about them, they’ll reject the “bargain of the social Internet”:

It exposes the lie that people online are fully aware of what they’re getting themselves into.

No, I take it back – seems that Facebook employees (at least here) feel scapegoated and sorry for themselves. Well, you were in an algo bubble when the future of democracy was being shaped on your platform, so I’d expect a conscience hangover also. I recommend wheat grass.

The New Kingmakers Then and Now – RedMonk’s Stephen O’Grady reviews the developers-as-kingmakers hypothesis. The “heretical has become practical,” but has given way to a new problem: fragmentation of tools.